218 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



" I nor advise, nor reprehend the choice 

 Of Marcley Hill ; the apple no where finds 

 A kinder mould : yet 'tis unsafe to trust 

 Deceitful ground : who knows but that once more 

 This mount may journey, and his present site 

 Forsaken, to thy neighbour's bounds transfer 

 Thy goodly plants, affording matter strange 

 For law debates !" 



But, when I came to consider better, I began to suspect that 

 though our hills may never have journeyed far, yet that the ends 

 of many of them have slipped and fallen away at distant periods, 

 leaving the cliffs bare and abrupt. This seems to have been the 

 case with Nore and Whetham Hills; and especially with the 

 ridge between Harteley Park and Wardleham, where the ground 

 has slid into vast swellings and furrows ; and lies still in such 

 romantic confusion as cannot be accounted for from any other 

 cause. A strange event, that happened not long since, justifies 

 our suspicions ; which, though it befell not within the limits of 

 this parish, yet as it was within the hundred of Selborne, and as 

 the circumstances were singular, may fairly claim a place in a 

 work of this nature. 



The months of January and February, in the year 1774, were 

 remarkable for great melting snows and vast gluts of rain, so 

 that by the end of the latter month the land-springs, or lavants, 

 began to prevail, and to be near as high as in the memorable 

 winter of 1764. The beginning of March also went on in the 

 same tenour ; when, in the night between the 8th and 9th of that 

 month, a considerable part of the great woody hanger at Hawk- 

 ley was torn from its place, and fell down, leaving a high free- 

 stone cliff naked and bare, and resembling the steep side of a 

 chalk-pit. It appears that this huge fragment, being perhaps 

 sapped and undermined by waters, foundered, and was ingulfed, 

 going down in a perpendicular direction ; for a gate which stood 

 in the field, on the top of the hill, after sinking with its posts 

 for thirty or forty feet, remained in so true and upright a posi- 

 tion as to open and shut with great exactness, just as in its first 

 situation. Several oaks also are still standing, and in a state of 

 vegetation, after taking the same desperate leap. That great 

 part of this prodigious mass was absorbed in some gulf below, 

 is plain also from the inclining ground at the bottom of the hill, 

 which is free and unincumbered ; but would have been buried 

 in heaps of rubbish had the fragment parted and fallen forward. 

 About a hundred yards from the foot of this hanging coppice 



